Return Files with send_file - Flask Web Development with Python 30

Key Takeaways

what's going on everybody welcome to another flash tutorial video in this video what we're going to be talking about is how you can return files with flask so that's pretty simple so won't take us very long to get through this one so let's open up init.py and first of all in the Imports here from flask go ahead and import uh send file as well now we'll come on down to I this will be a good spot copy this paste and we're going to have a couple of functions here the first one is going to be the page that the user might visit like file downloads file downloads and this is going to return uh render template template and we'll just have this be downloads. HTML and then we'll have another function that will be uh return files or return file that's fine um and then return file and instead of returning a template this returns a send file now um we'll just leave that empty for now and first let's go ahead and and get this downloads. HTML done so let's go over here and um as usual let's just duplicate the 404 and we'll call it downloads. HTML open that up and let's start cleaning this get rid of all that and then basically div to div here that's good enough okay so then within this file uh we're going to add a little download button so it'll be we'll have it actually link here to slash return file uh and we'll make the target a blank tab and then in here button class equals and this will be a BTN bn- default button slash button bong and between that we'll just have it say download okay so that's a good enough downloads we'll go ahead save that and good enough and then let's just pass a file in here so going back over here into static let's get some files so this is just a little image of python so python to jpg feel free to use whatever image you have at your disposal and then let's just give the full path to that image so that would just you can double click here and grab at least the starting path so send file and so you can send to that and then it was just python. jpg G now you can get away with just doing that and optionally you can have uh basically like a file name so you can say um you know attachment attachment file name equals python. jpg something like that is fine so we can save that and let's close out of here and let's uh reload there and we'll bring over the website and what was that download files I think download files maybe no that's not the name what was the name of our thing file downloads all right file Dash downloads all right so here we are and then we have the download button opens a new tab and sure enough what's return is just the image for us so we can move that aside and uh just for another example I've got a real short PDF here um oh hey. PDF and uh the return file here will be uh we can just call this oh. PDF come over here change this to oh. PDF save oh looks like oh I guess I never put that in and then let's try again there we go and let's come over back to our website uh let's refresh and click on that a we're still returning that let's see we might be cached here yeah sure enough we were cashed if you're cashed uh shift F5 if you're in Chrome anyway here's our awesome PDF um and important most importantly it acts as a PDF and if you were to go to you know save it and whatnot it would be saved as a PDF okay so anyway that's pretty simple the send file is pretty robust you don't really need to do too much else when you're doing like working with it so that's pretty nice now the next tutorial that we're going to be talking about is what happens if you want to like protect a file so maybe only certain users can access that file so with pythonprogramming.net for example I let the users just download the tutorial videos but you know you could make it so easily so the user can't access the page to get to the download button but the download would almost certainly have to reside within the static directory so stack director is public to everybody so that's no good all right so the next tutorial we'll be talking about how you can make a protected directory that is not accessible to the public and is only accessible to uh people or in scenarios that you specifically specify so uh that's what we'll be talking about in the next tutorial if you have questions comments on this tutorial feel free to leave below otherwise as always thanks for watching thanks for all the support and subscriptions and until next time